Aristotle’s "Rhetoric": A Pragmatist Analysis of Persuasive Interchange

Robert Prus

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.4.2.02

Authors

Robert Prus University of Waterloo, Canada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.4.2.02

Keywords:

Aristotle, Rhetoric, Influence, Activity, Agency, Identity, Emotions, Justice, Culpability, Symbolic interaction, Pragmatism

Abstract

Approaching rhetoric as the study of persuasive interchange, this paper considers the relevance of Aristotle's Rhetoric for the study of human group life. Although virtually unknown to modern day social scientists, this text has great relevance for contemporary scholarship. Not only does Aristotle's text centrally address influence work (and resistance), identities and reputations, deviance and culpability, emotionality and deliberation, and the broader process of human knowing and acting in political, character shaping, and courtroom contexts, but Aristotle also deals with these matters in remarkably comprehensive, systematic, and precise terms. Attending to the human capacity for agency, Aristotle also works with a sustained appreciation of purposive, reflective, adjustive interchange. Hence, whereas this text is invaluable of as a resource for the comparative transhistorical analysis of human interchange, it also suggests a great many ways that contemporary scholarship could be extended in the quest for a more adequate, more authentic social science.

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Author Biography

Robert Prus, University of Waterloo, Canada

Robert Prus, a professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo, is a symbolic interactionist, pragmatist ethnographer, and social theorist. Stressing the importance of connecting social theory with the study of human action in direct, experientially-engaged terms, he has written extensively on the ways that people make sense of and deal with the life-worlds in which they find themselves. His publications include Road Hustler with C.R.D. Sharper; Hookers, Rounders, and Desk Clerks with Styllianoss Irini; Making Sales; Pursuing Customers; Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research; Subcultural Mosaics and Intersubjective Realities; Beyond the Power Mystique; and The Deviant Mystique with Scott Grills. Working as an ethnohistorian and theorist, Robert Prus has been tracing the developmental flows of pragmatist thought from the classical Greek era (c700-300BCE) to the present time. This transhistorical venture has taken him into a number of areas of western social thought – including rhetoric, poetics, religious studies, history, education, politics, and philosophy.

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